hidden treasure

I’ve been digging through my photo libraries and external hard drives, poking around looking for shots for some upcoming gallery exhibits that I’m entering. Going back through these thousands of shots is like a treasure hunt, I’m looking for very specific images but I always get completely lost finding so much more as I dive down the rabbit hole that is my Lightroom catalog. With digital photography, we snap away to our heart’s content, and as such, accumulate quite a lot (especially those of us who are bad about culling, not naming names, but that would include me and about every photographer I know!)…Note to self: start deleting some stuff before you fill up another terabyte of space…because at this point you are basically hoarding.

So anyway, I’m digging around and I find some old film scans from a few years ago. The film was expired, making the colors totally wonky, oversaturated in some instances, washed out in others…grainy, imperfect, weird, funky. Each shot itself is nothing to write home about, these are just snaps I took on vacation with my old 35mm film camera. But I love them. I love that they’re rough around the edges and completely imperfect, experimental, fuzzy, and real. Because to me they capture the feeling of hanging out at the lake cabin perfectly. Time stands still. It’s the same now as it was 50 years ago. Simple, nothing fancy, and when you’re a kid, the greatest adventure imaginable.